This invention relates to contact stream optimization.
Organizations that desire to conduct a marketing campaign may have multiple contacts with a single customer. For example, an organization can send many different kinds of specialty catalogs to the same customer over a short period of time. Organizations may desire to limit the number of catalogs that are sent to the customer for various reasons. For example, if somebody receives a large number of catalogs from the same organization, they could simply ignore all subsequent mailings from that organization.
Techniques are known to solve what is often referred to as contact optimization. That is, to determine an optimal set of contacts to make with an individual over a period of time given global constraints placed by a marketing organization. One technique uses linear programming. Linear programming solves a system of linear inequalities. The problem is that for a large number of customers and offers the number of variables in these types of optimization problems may run into the millions, which could make a linear programming technique too computationally expensive.